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The Courage of the American Longshoremen and Dockworkers Around the World Can END GENOCIDE IN GAZA and Bring Peace to the Middle East.

Trump’s fascist Republican Party and the feeble American Democratic Party will never do either.

• Stop the Israeli Genocide, Ethnic-Cleansing, and Occupation of Gaza Now
• Build the Power of the Pro-Palestine Movement by Following the Political  Perspectives and Methods of the International Dockworkers’ Strikes that are Stopping Arms Shipments to Israel
• American Longshoremen: Join the Movement of Striking Dockworkers in Europe and North Africa to Immediately Crush the Trump/Netanyahu Policies of Genocide, Ethnic-Cleansing, and the Occupation of Gaza, and End the Constant Threat of Nuclear War and World War III
• Get Rid of Trump the Warmonger and Reject All His Hatemongering Demagogy
• In Asserting Their Power to End War in the Middle East, the Longshoremen Will Also Assert the Rebirth of the Power of the Organized Labor Movement
• There is No Time to Waste – the Pro-Palestine Movement Must Set Up Picket Lines in Every U.S. Port Now
• Organize Industrial, Transport, and Logistics Strikes to Protect and Support Longshoremen Strikes
• Build United Actions with the Independent Anti-Fascist, Immigrant Rights, Civil Rights, Environmental, LGBT+,  Women’s Rights, Anti-War, and Other Progressive Movements to Stop ICE Raids and Deportations and to Remove Donald Trump from the U.S. Presidency

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A New Working Class Leadership of the Pro-Palestine Movement Which Is Stopping Arms Shipments From Reaching the Israeli Defense Forces

The war criminals Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, both of whom aspire to be their generation’s most infamous fascist leaders, are destroying democratic norms in their own nations while carrying out the genocide and ethnic-cleansing of unarmed, defenseless, starving Palestinians. On August 21, 2025, the Israeli government confirmed that 5 out of every 6 people massacred in Gaza were civilians, including 50,000 children.

Until now, the huge and powerful worldwide pro-Palestine movement has been unable to live up to its tremendous potential. The pro-Palestine weapons blockade led by striking dockworkers from Europe and North Africa this spring and summer is the perfect antidote to the frustration and demoralization starting to bubble-up among movement activists. Now under the movement’s new working-class leadership, the best and most serious activists of the pro-Palestine movement can finally free themselves from the movement’s dominant leadership’s policy of handcuffing the movement to its own various national ruling classes.

The Development of the International Coordinated Dockworkers’ Strikes

This spring and summer, European and North African dockworkers spread strikes to the ports of virtually every country in Europe. In the months following April 18, 2025, when the new pro-Palestine dockworkers’ strikes began, they have grown in power by strengthening cross-border workers’ actions. The success of their strikes preventing weapons shipments from reaching Israel has motivated other unions to strike and is successfully reorienting and reinvigorating the pro-Palestine movement’s core activists. The movement’s rising young leaders are learning how to build an independent movement that is oriented to the workers and oppressed, instead of impotently begging the pro-Israel war-criminal leaders of both the Republican and Democratic Parties in the U.S. and their shrinking pool of billionaires and other imperialist and bourgeois national parties and governments, to save the Palestinian people.

A Tale of Two Movements

We now have two competing leadership wings of this vast, potentially overwhelmingly powerful movement, leaderships that are based on diametrically-opposite politics, strategies, goals, and methods. On the one hand are the leaders of the dockworkers’ strikes and the unrestrained and uncensored international mass, militant mobilizations that have played an essential role in building mass public support for Palestine and in preventing foreign arms shipments from reaching Israel. On the other hand are the middle-class, anti-militant, pro-capitalist leaders and organizations who currently dominate leadership of many national movements now. The politics, strategies, and methods of struggle of the two sides are counterposed – one has the real potential for victory, the other is commit-
ted to weak, losing policies.

U.S. Longshoremen and Their North American Brothers and Sisters Can Provide A Blow to Netanyahu

North American longshoremen, especially those in America, must add their tremendous power to stop arms shipments from getting to Israel – 70% of which are shipped from the U.S. The serious and determined rising movement leaders committed to using working-class methods of struggle can convince American longshoremen and other unions that the movement can protect them against the wrath of Donald Trump. By comparing the political orientations, strategies, methods, failures and successes of two counterposed tendencies in the movement, we can show why and how the pro-Palestine movement can prevent the destruction of Palestine. A new international movement led by workers and the specially oppressed can also end the austerity measures, destruction of the social welfare safety nets, rising unemployment, layoffs and union busting tactics utilized by Trump, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the leaders of the other governments who want to concentrate more wealth and power in the hands of deranged billionaires hellbent on destroying the planet.

Creating an International Alliance for Palestine

The Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (BDS) tactics have focused on impotent appeals to billionaire boards of directors, including the board of the Maersk shipping company, to divest or boycott arms shipments to Israel. In 2024, Maersk increased its profits by 60 percent, much of it derived from its arms shipments to Israel which the company denies ever making. The success that the BDS movement claims to have made from this effort was getting the Maersk board of directors to divest their stocks from Israeli munitions plants run by illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank in June 2025. This single action by Maersk was more likely in response to U.S. sanctions policies against the settlers left over from the Genocide Joe Biden presidency.

The BDS movement has made failed appeals to the governments of imperialist superpowers, all of whom, including China, in reality, support Israel. The billionaire backers of these governments, including people like Elon Musk, have been willing to sacrifice tens of millions of dollars of profits to spontaneous consumer boycotts, rather than give up their megalomaniacal fantasy of being rulers of the whole world. These powers are well described in a recent Guardian article: “The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.” (“The rise of end times fascism,” Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor, Guardian, April 13, 2025)

When, in June 2025, dockworkers at the Marseille-Fos port in France called a strike that shut down the port for five days to pre- vent pieces of potential military equipment from reaching Israel, the dockworkers’ strike movement became a cross-border strike movement. The dockworkers refused to load 14 tons of machine gun links for Israeli Negev 5 machine guns, used to mow down starving Palestinians trying to get aid from phony U.S./Israeli aid trucks. This inspired dockworkers in Genoa, Italy to begin their own strike to prevent military equipment from reaching Israel.

The successful dockworkers’ strike spread to virtually every other European country, including Germany, and to Turkey. In August 2025, after a nationwide public-sector workers’ strike of 600,000 workers followed the lead of the striking dockworkers which debilitated the Turkish economy and government, the Turkish government passed a resolution to ban all Israeli-affiliated ships from entering its ports and to ban vessels under the Turkish flag trading with Israel. Learning from the Spanish dockworkers, Turkish dockworkers continually check the cargo of every ship assumed to be carrying military aid to Israel in order to enforce the government’s declaration. The government of Germany was forced to pass a resolution calling for sanctions against the supply of military aid to Israel. Once again, the German dock- workers of the huge port in Hamburg used the passage of this resolution to continue to conduct their dockworkers strike to make sure that the resolution was actually enforced.

Another gain of the international coordinated dockworkers’ strike actions was the declaration by Belgian dockworkers at the Antwerp port – the second-largest in Europe and a center of the Maersk shipping operation – that they would conduct strikes to stop the loading and unloading of Israeli military cargo at their enormous port.

The dockworkers’ strikes have resulted in support strike actions by logistical, transport, airport, and other unions which are successfully breaking the export chains in their respective countries.

The dockworkers and logistics workers’ unions in Italy and Greece have called for an international conference to plan worldwide days of strikes to occur on September 26, 2025.

The Right of the Palestinian People to Self-Determination

BDS posits the false theory that Israel today is an “apartheid” regime like South Africa in the past, so the struggle for the liberation of Palestine can be achieved by using the same tactics that were supposedly used to defeat the white regime of South Africa. This fails to recognize that the white colonial apartheid state of South Africa was ruled by a tiny minority of the South African population, and that the U.S.’s imposition of sanctions against South Africa came in response to the unstoppable character of huge and powerful strikes and uprisings of black and Asian South African workers and youth that threatened the violent overthrow of apartheid. Surrounded by a huge majority of increasingly mobilized, militant, and violent black and Asian people, who increasingly threatened the revolutionary destruction of the tyranny of the tiny white minority apartheid regime, this regime took desperate measures to avoid revolution. The apartheid regime was forced to enter into negotiations with the African National Congress (ANC), and to concede holding national elections which created the formality of black-majority government to the ANC and the mass movement. The revolutionary movement inevitably threatened new revolutions in the whole of southern Africa, including Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and German South West Africa (now Namibia).

In contrast, the Palestinian people of both Gaza and the West Bank are fighting for their own state – independent of Israel. With the Israeli Jewish population overwhelmingly prepared to support the ethnic-cleansing of Gaza, the idea of a struggle against “apartheid” in Israel as a prior condition for the achievement of Palestinian rights is absurd and indefensible. This merely creates an imaginary perspective that makes the anti-Palestinian consciousness of the current majority of Jews of Israel a permanent block to the liberation of Palestine. Placing Palestinian self-determination in the hands of the current genocidal, ultra-Zionist government and the current pro-ethnic-cleansing Jewish people of Israel, is a cruel, indefensible hoax.

Instead of fighting for victory for the Palestinians, this “Israeli apartheid” perspective with its implied “one state solution” subordinates all Palestinian rights to the tender mercies of the ethnic-cleansers of the current ultra-Zionist fascist government of Israel or the phony leftist illusion of a wave of benign reformism for an “anti-Zionist revolution” of the current pro-ethnic-cleansing majority of the Israeli Jewish population. The freedom of the slaves is to be left in the hands of the slaveholders. This is all the “divestment to end apartheid” could actually achieve.

Most dockworkers have seen their task as forcing the Israeli military to retreat from Gaza, to get medical aid and ample food supplies to end the genocide in Gaza and to give the Palestinian people the right of self-determination.

From the beginning of the Israeli government’s systematic campaign of laying waste to every neighborhood, business, school, hospital and religious/cultural institution of Gaza, coupled with its unthinkably brutal genocide of the Palestinians, two things have been true: first, the unwavering loyalty and support of the majority of the Palestinian people for Hamas and second, their hate for the sell-out collaborators with the Israeli government in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority (PA). In the last set of elections in Gaza, Hamas was elected to lead the government.

The demand of Hamas is for a two state solution, with Palestinians having full rights to democratically elect their own independent government, with full control over the political economy of their nation and the right to defend their borders without any Israeli interference. This remains the most popular demand of the Palestinians living in Gaza for their independence and their right to self determination.

The dockworkers’ actions presume that it is the movement’s responsibility to defeat the IDF on the battlefield and to bring an end to the genocide, ethnic cleansing and occupation of Gaza. The dockworkers’ strikes are aimed at preventing the Israeli government from receiving more military aid and achieving peace. They do not dictate to the Palestinians what the contours of their demand for nationhood should be. This is because their actions are directed at the needs of the Palestinians and not to the imperialist powers or the very wealthy Gulf states who are working out among themselves another treacherous pro-Israel “solution” that will never bring about peace or independent nationhood for the people of Gaza.

The second strategy of the dockworkers is to treat the Genocide Convention, specific UN General Assembly and Committee decisions on how the Genocide Convention’s rules apply to the genocide, ethnic cleansing and the Israeli military occupation of Gaza and the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) decisions as binding decisions on the whole international community, even if their governments are treating the same resolutions and decisions as mere polling data that exists primarily to express changing international alliances.

Since the dockworkers treat the Genocide Convention and ICJ rulings as what every nation represented at the UN have agreed to since the formation of the UN — international binding decisions — they evoke them as the legal authority to explain why their strikes are legal. This places their governments in the position to explain why they are doing nothing to enforce the treaties they signed or the resolutions they voted for and instead are punishing the actions of their own citizens for acting to carry out the will of their governments. This policy buys time for the dockworkers to continue their strike actions during the time that their legal cases are making their way through national and international courts. It also exposes the hypocrisy and dishonesty of their own governments.

Win the Fight Now for Humanitarian Aid by Breaking Israel’s Genocidal Blockade of Gaza By Any Means Necessary

Israel’s naval blockade preventing aid from entering Gaza is an act of genocide comparable to the military guards around Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps to stop the anti-fascist movement in Europe from saving the Jews.

The Global Sumud Flotilla, bearing food and medical supplies for Gaza, includes brave and serious nonviolent activists, including Greta Thunberg, from 44 different countries. Their strategy is to pressure their own governments to intercede to enforce the legal right of their citizens to deliver aid into Gaza. However, the only one of those nations Israel would listen to, the United States, is under the fascist president Donald Trump, who is a firm and unwavering supporter of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The other countries have proven themselves incapable of standing up to Trump’s economic threats and warmongering.

On August 31, 2025, Genoa dockworkers announced that they had placed tracking devices on the ships in the food and medical aid flotilla leaving their port. They have declared that if they lose contact with any of their flotilla ships for more than 20 minutes, they will shut down the port of Genoa and call on dockworkers around the world to strike so that no supplies, military or otherwise, will reach Israel. It is clear that international working-class strikes are the only boycott/divestment/sanctions policy that has the power to shift the international balance of power to the working class and away from the ruling class governments of the world.

These actions lay down the groundwork necessary to remove Donald Trump and his co-thinkers from power, by building the power of the only real humanitarians: the workers and oppressed people of America and their worldwide allies – the forces that are beginning to recognize the necessity to create a new world order based on the historic, humane, and powerful program and principles of the working class.

The workers of Europe are already exercising their power to enforce their own international trade policies, including assuring the safe arrival of aid to Gaza, by enforcing a workers’ embargo to stop all foreign goods from reaching Israel.

U.S. longshoremen must use the power they have to stop the genocide in Gaza and to save the lives of 2 million Palestinian civilians

Enforce the UN and International Court of Justice (ICJ) Decisions Against Israeli War Crimes and to End the Genocide – With Action by the Workers and Pro-Palestine Movements

The total number of U.S. longshoremen is slightly under 70,000. This small unionized workforce is more powerful than the numbers suggest – more powerful than even any union, including public-sector workers’ unions, the UAW, the United Mine Workers, the Teamsters, etc., because of the centrality of the longshoremen to world trade. The power of a longshoremen’s strike has a ripple effect domestically and internationally that could actually implement the United Nations and International Court of Justice decisions condemning and attempting to end Israel’s war crimes against the people of Gaza. Such actions would strengthen the struggle of the entire movement against the attacks on Gaza, by providing the basis for legal action by the striking workers and the pro-Palestine movement against any attempts by their own national governments to repress their actions, enabling and making possible the further enforcement of action by the international legal bodies.

It can also make a dent in the production of military equipment produced for Israel, other foreign governments, and large-scale private mercenary outfits and off-the-books arms dealers.

The ILA Contract Strike of October 1-3, 2024

This phenomenal power was expressed by the ILA in their economic/political contract strike on October 1-3, 2024. According to JP Morgan, even though the strike was limited to East Coast and Gulf ports, the strike cost U.S. businesses approximately $4.5 billion of losses per day.

This means that, if even some longshoremen’s union locals vote to hot cargo military supplies going from the U.S. to Israel and vice versa, they could give both support and hope that reinforcements are on the way to the 2 million Palestinian civilians who are standing as one.

Open A New Phase of Worker, Student, and Youth Strikes Across America

The beginning of even limited hot-cargoing campaigns would electrify the pro-Palestinian movement, inspire more strikes in a number of different industries and service providers in the U.S and embolden and strengthen the entire pro-Palestine movement worldwide. Unionized workers are sick and tired of concessionary contracts and watching their leaders, like International UAW President Shawn Fain, suck up to the fascist, corrupt, lawless, anti-labor and worker-hating, and billionaires’-darling President Donald Trump. Millions of workers are angry, frustrated, and tired of doing nothing to stop their declining living standards and the elimination of democracy and every progressive policy of the last century, policies which the majority of Americans support. They all support free speech and are eager to find a way for their voices, demands and future visions to be realized, because that is impossible to foresee happening via the ballot box.

The Trump tariffs are creating a new army of the unemployed. The only way for unemployed workers to fight is by taking united actions with all the movements using the tactics of the dockworkers strikes to win. A new movement of the unemployed will have to fight for a political program of demands which are already popular in the No Kings and anti-fascist movements, including: the restoration of Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance that will cover long-term unemployment, subsidized job training and retraining programs, re-instituting public infrastructure programs and for no more layoffs.

The No-Kings Day protest last summer proved that millions of Americans are prepared to fight to save the country from fascism. The No-Kings Day movement needs serious, organized, militant, working-class leadership to win their main demand: Stop the fascist takeover of America by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. The longshoremen need mass outpourings of support to show Trump that if he goes after longshoremen, he will face a massive popular uprising that could shut down the American economy and remove him from office. This happened to former President Richard Nixon, so why not Donald Trump? We already can see the growth of an alliance of a new international movement of longshoremen hot-cargoing arms to Israel – including international dockworkers’ strikes. This should be linked to an alliance with the best leaders of the No-Kings Day and pro-Palestine movements to build national-action campaigns for support for the dockworkers’ strikes worldwide. Such an alliance would change history and literally save the planet from the imminent destruction it is facing.

This Summer’s Coordinated Mass Strikes in France Leading to A National General Strike in September 2025

In France this summer, the dockworkers’ strikes were joined by large sectors of workers in contract negotiations including a national rail workers’ strike, transportation strikes, airport workers at Europe’s second largest airport, the Charles De Gaulle International airport which resulted in pro-Palestine hot-cargoing actions at the airport by striking workers. The French unions are now planning a one day national general strike. French air traffic controllers will join the current strike wave in a matter of days. The addition of air traffic controllers to the strike creates the real possibility of grounding war criminals such as Benjamin Netanyahu.

The policy of hot cargoing military supplies going to Israel could have been implemented by either the ILWU or the ILA leaderships one year ago. In order to win, the rank-and-file of the two unions have to reject the advice and/or the threats of their top pro-capitalist, anti-action leaderships.

The Perfidious Backing of the Gaza Genocide by Both the International Executive Boards of the ILA Tied to Trump, and the ILWU Tied to the Top Leadership of the Democrats

In the summer of 2024, the membership of ILWU Local 10 from the Bay Area unanimously passed a resolution calling for longshoremen to boycott handling military aid destined for Israel. The ILWU Executive Board at the International Convention, held in July 2024, killed the motion. The Executive Board maneuvered to get a useless, purely symbolic motion for a ceasefire passed at the convention. The Executive Board treachery was based on the political decision to prevent the passage of any motion criticizing the Biden-Harris administration’s complicity in and facilitating of the Gaza genocide. This decision to abandon every basic human-rights principle and prevent ILWU members from saving countless Palestinian lives ironically did the opposite of what it was meant to do. It guaranteed the defeat of the Democrats’ 2024 presidential candidate election.

The rank-and-file base of the Democratic Party, repulsed and horrified by the Biden-Harris administration’s support of and complicity with genocide and their endless string of insulting false promises to stop “Netanyahu’s genocide,” could not get themselves to vote for the Democrats’ complicit war criminals as the lesser of two evils. The action called for by the ILWU Local 10 motion would have altered the entire national and international political situation and transcended the paralysis on progressive action imposed by the impotent and bankrupt American two-party system.

Ironically, if the left wing of the Democratic Party had the leadership they needed to publicly criticize their party’s Gaza policy, proving that they would refuse to be marginalized by their party’s leadership, and blowing away the myth that, to win the presidency, the Democrats needed to curry the support of white racist Trump voters, that would have helped Harris win the election – however undeservedly – while also defending the lives of Palestinian civilians. The elections of both Obama and Biden showed that the Democrats can win the presidency even when losing the majority of white voters. Only empowering the party’s mass, progressive, majority-minority base could have gotten Harris the voter turnout she needed to win. The fundamental aim and impact of such a strategy, however, would not be to empower the imperialist policies of the Democrats, but rather to empower the movements of the workers and oppressed of the world in real humanitarian action.

In January 2025, after Trump won the presidential election but before he took office, the ILA leadership ballyhooed Trump as the savior of the ILA. By elevating the importance of Donald Trump to the six-year settlement, the ILA leadership surrendered control of the union to Donald Trump, who they knew would try to destroy the union if it ever took actions that challenged the anti-union, anti-worker policies of his administration. In reality, it was the militancy of the ILA’s October strike that won the contract: Trump feared that a dockworkers’ strike at the dawn of his presidency would have (1) stopped the shipment of arms for Israel’s genocide and (2) sparked a wave of working-class strikes and mass actions of the oppressed to defeat his fascist presidency.

The genocidal-complicit leaderships of the ILWU and ILA tops cannot be allowed to sabotage the actions of longshore workers, which can save the lives of the two-million-plus people in Gaza.

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